September 2007

Shannon,

I'm sorry it's taken me this long to reply to your touching message. It's nice to know you were so moved by my words. John was a good friend, and a man I think you would've liked. But I'm sure you were really thinking of the people you love, the ones you'd miss if you lost them. I hope that if nothing else I reminded you to spend more time with them while you can.

 I do have one question for you, though: what are doing at work at 4:30 A.M.? Unless you are embezzling funds or downloading porn there is no excuse for this. Get your ass home and into bed with someone you love. Or at least an excellent cat.

It's nice to hear from you again.

Tim

Chris,

First of all, let me apologize for the delay in my reply. As you know if you've been reading the cartoon, life has been complicated lately.

I am flattered that you found my essay on A.I. worthy of such serious thought. But let me backpedal a little and clarify that the rather bleak, deterministic, Freudian worldview I was articulating in that essay is only the one I believe is expressed by that particular work of art. But no work of art, except maybe The Big Lebowski, can ever encompass the whole truth about the human condition. It's really not clear how much is inalterably "hardwired" into human beings. We do have extremely resilient, redundant, and versatile brains with the capacity to rewire themselves. In other words, we can change. Not that we do, much. People can (and do) spend their whole lives attracted to the same types, looking for surrogate parents, making the same mistakes and reenacting the same old traumas and contriving to bring the same disasters upon themselves over and over (me included). But we are more or less conscious beings, and some of us are perceptive and truthful enough to see these patterns in our own lives and try to get out of them (me not necessarily included). But who knows? Maybe this is just another illusion we have to convince ourselves of in order to get through the days and proceed as though we had free will. Even if so, I am all for it. It is, after all, the only game in town.

I don't think that regarding women as real people rather than ideals disqualifies you from having romantic relationships; on the contrary, I think itÕs a prerequisite for having any kind of real relationship. Don't worry about the magic; it eventually afflicts everyone whether they want it to or not, and then later the piteous weeping. YouÕre probably right that most people's relationships are based on illusion, and this is one reason they don't last. My old dance instructor used to say that "Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not." It must be said that he didn't have a lot of luck with the ladies and is not 100% to be trusted on this particular subject. I'm not exactly an expert, either.

Being angry about things you can't control seems to me less like some rare pathology than the common lot of human beings. If you have a temper, well, you have it, and you're probably stuck with it (though it's likely to mellow with age--testosterone is a terrible drug, like being on PCP for decades). What you can control is how you react to it. Which also isn't easy, and not nearly as much fun as punching people in the face. I struggle with this still. Just try to stay out of jail.  This is one of my modest goals in life and I would suggest it is a good one for you to strive for as well. In any case I think it's too fatalistic and self-defeating to imagine that you are too old to back off from that path and find your way back to civilization.

As for the will to truth, my old dance instructor used to say: "Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for the peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of the truth, then inquire." For him, I think, the relentless badgering after truth arose, paradoxically, out of the moral impulse, the same drive that produces both the spooky and kindly lies of religion. He collapsed after throwing his arms around a horse that was being flogged and ended up a catatonic husk but, again, I'm not sure this discredits his advice. I hope that dementia is not the inevitable consequence of inquiry.

You sound like a smart and thoughtful and troubled guy, Chris--and I don't mean "troubled" in the euphemistic clinical sense but honestly and rightly troubled by the conundrums, double-binds and bullshit of being alive and conscious in this world. Your smarts and thoughtfulness will get you some way toward getting through it all. Just don't overthink yourself into paralysis, or get so lost inside your own head that you neglect your feelings. (Again, my old dance instructor: "Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings; always darker, emptier, simpler.") I mention these things only because they are the particular occupational hazards of the smart (me espeically).

Speaking of which, please politely overlook the Mr. Smartypants tone of this note and see if you can't find something useful in it. I hope you will. Let me make clear, if it isn't clear enough already, that I'm not writing you as a Wise Mentor but as just another confused screwed-up person on the planet who's trying to figure out even one thing before I die. I won't promise you you'll be all right, because, truly, no one can promise that to anyone else. I can tell you that art helps a little. Meditation is supposed to help, though I'm lazy about it. Drugs and alcohol don't actually help as much as they seem to at first, but if you're smarter than I am you won't need to be told this. Other people help most of all.

I wish you well. Write any time.

Tim

Ool:

I transmitted by relay your explanation to Mr. Kreider but then he furrowed his face and regards it as a luxuriant sophism that abjectly requests the question. Is the cause and the effect only one illusion of human interpretation, or a phenomenon which breaks up and does not exist at the beginning of the universe, like electromagnetism? He is not buying it. It is not very clear why the whole something should exist rather than not, and this reasoning is not to solve the central mystery of the existence for him. Nor do your arguments concerning death make him wish for the acceleration of his own.

Nevertheless let us thank you for the writing with your thoughts and sympathy.

Respect,

C.-H.

P.S. Mr. Kreider affixes the following play of spirit: "Notification there is no 'P' in it. Please to help us to keep this way!" It is apparently an hilarity common in America, opaque with me.

Catherine Allan:

We firstly thank you for your compliments on Mr. Kreider's work. Always it means much to have news of the readers.

Mr. Kreider certainly does not fear the enthusiast of history with the blasting powder to shoot squirrels. Only the squirrel needs to fear it. But it must to admit that the guns are not exactly an activity of history like manufacture of soiled glass or drawing the cartoon-strips, yes? Moreover, few Americans seem to clean them for history reasons. They have them for contemporary reasons such as hatred of the federal government and the fear of the negro.

It is to be certain that the majority of the crimes are with the illegal guns. However, it would not be more difficult to obtain the illegal guns if all such weapons were illegal? But I learned that it is useless to engage in discussion on this subject. The Americans are a nation of barbarians, they always had guns to exterminate buffalo and the pigeon of passenger and the Indian, they will always have the guns, it is their response to all, just as you say, their hearts are seized by fear.

I thank you for your pensive words and regret my comments ungracious on this country which was my host centre. But it is hateful to see the American children killed and the paid lawyers of the businesses of guns insist on the fact that all is well, all is well, all is well.

Respect,

C.-H.

Eli Friedmann:

I thank you for your complimetns on my efforts with filling the place of Mr. Kreider with my maladroit prose. It is good that you are amused by my account of American sauce-with-the-juice. O that there had been more real, nonfigurative, fruit on my travel. At least the goodwill came from it.

Respect,

C.-H.

Tom Ragatz of the Parrot Totem:

I tardily thank you for your commending of my efforts in the name of Mr. Kreider.

I believe that you write with Mr. Kreider at an address extinct, the hated AOL.

No matter what arrives it is little probable with him to visit Kansas, which I regret saying.

Respect,

C.-H.

Adam,

Your kind message was not inappropriate at all; on the contrary, it's gratifying to know that my very personal, in-joky testament to my late friend touched someone on the other side of the world.

As for the artist's statements, I was at first, and still am, ambivalent about including them at all. I call them "artist's statements" as a kind of nervous, tongue-in-cheek reference to the Artist's Statements printed on pamphlets or plaques that accompany shows in galleries or museums. Reading these little fantasias of bulllshit invariably reminds you why the author is a painter or sculptor and not a writer. I believe strongly that artists ought to do their work and then shut up and get out of the way. My colleague Megan recently received a letter from a reader who'd very much enjoyed the story she recently concluded in the New York Times Magazine ("Watergate Sue" http://www.nytimes.com/ref/magazine/funnypagesWatergate.html) but wanted to know "what the aprupt, enigmatic last panel meant." Megan declined to explain her ending, not out of artsy cussedness but because any explanation would only diminish the reader's appreciation of the story, solve it like a puzzle instead of letting it linger troublingly in her mind. As Stanley Kubrick, who got a lot of this sort of thing, always put it, imagine if Leonardo had told us that the Mona Lisa is smiling because she's hiding a secret from her lover. An enigma that's beguiled the centuries would be definiteively answered, finished and dead, like a butterfly pinned to an index card. Like the artist Robert Smithson said, "Establish enigmas, not explanations." Which is what I strive to do with provocative and challenging works such as "Cuckold!' and "Graveyard Shift at the Pussy Juice Factory."

However, I am by temperament a long-winded ranter, raconteur, and wackjob theorist--which is to say, a frustrated writer--and regrettably I cannot resist the opportunity to use my website as a soapbox every week. I do try to avoid ever explicated my cartoons and confine myself instead to tangential rants about politics or, on occasion, personal reflections. Anyway, to answer, at unnecessary length, your question, I keep the artist's statements at a click's remove out of consideration for to those readers who would rather not have their art expplained, clarified, or expanded upon in any way. Which is not to say I don't appreciate your compliments of my prose.

Thanks for writing, and may you, too, keep courage in the times to come--or, as we say in America,  "Don't let the bastards get you down."

Regards,

Tim Kreider

Anton Markwart:

I have consulted Mr. K about this provocative question. He mushes the face of thought and then made the following declaration: Some are purple with the spots pink. Others, pink with the spots purple. However, W_______s themselves are unmindful of this distinction and there is no discrimination among them.

The tails are coloured tail. Perhaps to use the real tails of the squirrel?

Respect,

Mrs. C. - H.

P.S. We ask with respect of the photographs of finished Cushions of W_______s.

Emma Eshleman:

It is rare that Mr. K. must be found with a loss for words. And still Mr. K. and I both are returned without voice by this thing. What must be made of the ageing bald person in the foreground who feels his hand, unconscious with nudity writhing behind? But they would be only the Germans who would conceive of a so repulsive project.

We thank you for bringing this to our attention, although it is untrue to say that we are grateful.

Respect,

C.-H.

Phil Pierson:

Mr. Kreider tries to obtain exactitude in such details. Although he fears to hear of the errors from the experts in all fields, more than all he fears is to receive the complaints of the experts of the imaginary.

Mr. K requests to know what the "S" represents. I myself tire of such things.

Respect,

C.-H.

NOTE FROM MS. C.-H.: Although Mr. Kreider voluntarily transmitted the numbers of the "Ball of Power" to the reader they do not have to be divided with the readership general. But it is debatable since alas, they proved vague.

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